“I have come with the coin to buy you the time you need. I have come to bring you warriors. They are few now, but the Wilder Kin in the forest have reason to appreciate us. I think this force of warriors I offer can be as many as you desire.”
Gilthas looked at her long, his face alight, his hope shining. “Who are you?” he whispered, and she thought she heard a note of superstitious wonder in his voice, as though some mage of old had cast a change-spell upon her.
Kerian took his hands in her own. “Why, I thought you knew. I am the King’s Outlaw, my love. I am your weapon, I am your warrior, and I am your lover, my lord king. Never doubt it.”
In the golden firelight he looked upon her as though upon something magical, powerful, and his.
There, in his bed, they began to speak of something no one else had ventured to discuss in all the years of the dragon’s occupation, through all the depredations of her Knights. While Senator Rashas and his fellows enjoyed the hospitality of the king they professed to honor and yet in truth despised for a weakling, the king and his outlaw began to speak of resistance to all they had until now endured.
* * * * *
The King’s Outlaw left Wide Spreading the next day, a freezing day of black and gray. She left with her breath pluming out before her, carried by the following wind. Gilthas had provided food and a pouch ringing with steel coins. A fat quiver of arrows hung at her hip, a fine long bow across her shoulders. In its sheath was the bone-handled knife she’d had from a dour dwarf, the sword she’d taken off a battleground.
Kerian went up into the forest with her hope rising. What she’d said to Gil about the Kagonesti having reason to be grateful to her and her fighters was true. She would try to rally them all, the elusive tribes, and ask if they would join her and make the elf king’s cause their own. First, before all, however, she would try her brother, for these were kin.
She knew the way to Eagle Flight’s encampment, though her brother had not told or shown her. She knew because Jeratt knew, for he came and went when times allowed, to see his niece Ayensha. He used to say to Kerian, “You know the way, but don’t go unless you have to,” and by that she knew that her brother would not have welcomed her. Now, this snow-threatening day, she decided she would go, and it wouldn’t be up to Dar to decide whether she should come.
When she found him, she found him standing as one who trembled on the edge of the legendary Abyss.
* * * * *
Kerian’s nostrils filled with the nauseating stench of burnt flesh and bone. Under an iron sky the earth Iydahar stood upon stretched out to a purling river, a great gaping blackness of ash and burning. He didn’t see her, or if he did, he didn’t care. He knelt before a pit still steaming from a great burning, grey tendrils ghosting up from the charnel pit and wolves lurking across the river, staring. He didn’t care about wolves, for he carried no weapon, not even a knife at his belt. He dipped his hand into the pit, into sooty ash, and he stood.
Iydahar turned slowly. She saw that his hands were dark with soot, as he rose and came toward her. He moved as though stalking. She wasn’t sure he recognized her. Kerian’s hand drifted to her knife, then fell away. She did not challenge her brother but took a step away to let him know she was no threat.
“Sister,” he hissed, “you’ve come to visit? Too bad, too late. Knights came before you did, with torches and swords. We stood as best we could, but…”
They were a dozen Knights with swords and maces, They were a dozen Knights and encased in armor like midnight. Their war-horses were weapons, steel-shod hoofs trampling any who resisted, and then any who got in the way. Old people, little children, they died under the steel shoes as warriors scrambled for arrows that in the end did little damaged to armor-cased Knights.
Dar gestured around the blackened ruin of what had once been the encampment of the small tribe of Wilder Elves, a winter home by the river. Looking at him standing in the ruin, Kerian heard, faint, the echoes of that killing, as though the cries of the slaughtered yet clung to the woodland and the hills beyond.
“There’s no one here but me now.”
Ayensha! Ah, gods! Bueren Rose!
“No,” he said, understanding her frantic glances around, but the sound was a growling, hardly a word. “They’re not there. My wife survived the burning, and Bueren Rose. A few others, too. They are off and away, gone to be with your outlaws.”
His hand shot out, grabbing her wrist with grinding strength. She did not pull away or force him to disengage. Dar bent She watched, fascinated, as he ran his fingers through ash and soot like a painter’s brush on a palette. He rose again, making one stroke and then another; he painted her face in patterns of soot.
Finger pressing the flesh of her face roughly, he made a mask of darkness on her, and he said, “Do you remember, Kerianseray? Or have you so far fallen that you’ve forgotten how the Wilder Folk mourn? Do you remember how to paint your sorrow on your face?”
He blackened her brow. Kerian let him. He smudged her temples. He ran a sooty thumb down her nose, and he smeared her chin with the heel of his hand. His teeth flashing in a terrible grin, he darkened her cheeks, and when he was done, he flung back his head and he raised his fists as though to threaten the sky.
“They are dead!” he shouted, to her, to the forest, to the sky where people used to turn their faces and imagine they could speak with gods. “They are dead! The children! The mothers! The fathers!”
As he turned, she saw that the strength had run out of him with the shouting. Kerian leaped. She caught him before his knees gave way. He bore them both to the ground, but she dropped first to her knees and so was able to lower him gently.
She knew how to mourn. Though she had not practiced the Wilder mourning in many long years, she had not forgotten how to grieve. They wept the grief-storm, brother and sister. They washed away all the colors of sorrow with their tears. One wept for all the people he knew, the other for all the people she would never know.
In the end, with night falling, they began to talk. Iyda-har spoke of his rage, while Kerian spoke of her mission. He told her how well and deeply he hated the Knights, how little love he had for her king.
“The boy who sold his throne. For what? A year or two to play at being king?”
Anger rose in her, flushing her cheeks till then cool with sorrow. “No, Dar, don’t speak of Gilthas that way. He’s-”
His expression grew hard. It was as though a door had suddenly swung shut. “Ah, you, Keri. No one could miss the secret you hold, girl. It’s all over you, all the time. So you keep his bed warm, do you? Aye, well,” he growled bitterly, “good for the little king, then. If he doesn’t get to rule or wield armies, he gets some of the privileges and rights of kings. “
Coldly, she said, “What are you going to call me now, Dar? The king’s whore?”
Iydahar regarded her, hard from narrowed eyes. “No one’s calling you his wife, are they? No one’s looking at you in the streets and naming you his queen. Is he ashamed of his Wilder Elf woman?”
The loud crack of her palm across his face startled them both. He sat gaping. She leaped to her feet, cheeks flaming. The print of her hand showed white where Dar’s grief-paint still clung, red on the naked flesh.
Though she had planned to tell her brother about her plans for a resistance, counted on it, Kerian realized she could not. She did not dare ask him to join a rebellion intended to buy time for a king he despised.
“Dar, is there anything I can do here?”
He shook his head. “I’m not staying.”
“What about Ayensha?”
His eyes flashed, anger and pain. “She thinks she’s found a cause.” He sneered the word. “Go look for her with her uncle and your outlaws.”
Kenan looked around at the scorched earth, the charnel pit, the wolves padding. Softly, night crept down, the howl of the sky turned deeply blue and the pale sliver of the new moon showed in the east, high beyond the tops of the trees. Dar rose. He looked at
her long, and she felt a hollowness in her heart, feeling his eyes on her, his distant gaze. He was already thinking about his path away from this black and burned place.
“You’re going?” she asked.
“Away.”
Kerian heard that in silence, then she said, “Don’t go south, Dar. There are draconians there. Don’t go west, they hold every road, and the Knights are with them.”
He didn’t thank her for her warning, and she didn’t wait to hear more from him. She rose and left him. She did not expect to see him again.
Chapter Seventeem
“Fool”
Fists clenching, Kerian looked around at the half dozen fighters, three of them bleeding, two of those unable to stand, and two dead. Flies buzzed over the wounds. The coppery stench of blood hung in the dusty summer air.
One of the dead was Briar, a woman Kerian had first met in the sheltered basin behind Lightning Falls. Autumn had come and gone twice since then, and winter and spring, and now summer grew old around her. Yet it seemed she had known Briar for a score of years, certainly for a score of battles. Briar had become notorious among the Knights for her fierceness. Into every battle the tall elf woman had worn the mail shirt that might, a long time ago, have been made for a prince. Even princely mail couldn’t protect her against stupid mistakes.
Kerian looked at the overturned wagon, two wheels still spinning. Two outlaws dead, three wounded, and one Knight bleeding away the last of his life. The other Knight of the two-man escort had abandoned his companion and the driver of the wagon and fled through the forest to the Qualinost Road. Already, Elder was sinking into that eerie trance of hers to call up the confusion of senses. In moments, the Knight would find himself helpless on a road he’d traveled so often.
A thin line of pain etched between Kerian’s eyes, as if a thumb were pressing hard on the bridge of her nose. Head up, she listened to her body, tracking the source of the pain until the tightened muscles of her jaws assured her that the headache was nothing more than the result of teeth clenched in anger. It could have had a more dangerous source.
In spring the Skull Knight Thagol had returned from the east of the kingdom, drawn by news of the Night People. Since then Kerian suffered headaches, and since then she understood that some headaches were the result of hunger, weariness, or injury, and others had no natural explanation. The touch of the mind of a Skull Knight caused these.
Thagol sought the leader of the Night People. Down the avenues of the night, he hunted her in dreams. The strange headaches had started after the first successful raid Kerian mounted against one of the border outposts. These were ugly structures of stone and wood built between the forest and the gorges that scored the earth between the elven kingdom and the Stonelands. Five Knights had died in the first raid, and four more perished when they arrived to relieve the watch. The four who died last imagined the three black-armored warriors they saw on duty were their knightly brethren and didn’t discover until too late that they were five of the Night People in Knights’ clothing. Kerian had ordered the dead stripped of anything useful then left the corpses to rot. This time that tactic, used for gaining weapons and depriving the enemy of steel, did not serve her well.
Soon after, on a dark-moon night, Kerian woke from a dream and sat up shaking, cold sweat running on her.
Shivering with her blankets wrapped around her, she looked up at the sky ablaze with stars too bright to long behold. Across the stony basin, in the night where embers of the outlaws’ fires breathed faintly, she saw the old woman, Elder, whose voice was like prophecy. As though beckoned, she rose and went to the ancient. She sat down beside her. White hair like starlight, shining, Elder leaned close.
“He hunts,” she whispered, her voice low. “He hunts you, Kerian of Qualinesti, on the roads of your dreams. If he catches you, he catches all, even your king.”
“How does he do this? Can you help me?”
Elder didn’t know, but she could help Kerian and did. She knew a way of magic to prevent her dreaming. She knew how to enchant and what spells would serve to protect.
Protected, Kerian also knew loss. She had met the king twice more since that first time in winter, met him in the forest in spring when he called her to warn that Thagol had returned, again at Wide Spreading in early summer. She didn’t dream of him any more, for she carried a bloodstone from Elder, draining her of dreams and shielding her from Thagol’s magic Even so, the Lord Knight didn’t give up his hunt, and though he could not stalk by night, he did well by day, catching psychic scent of her when one of his Knights died by her hand. Somehow he tracked her by the deaths of his warriors. Waking, she had no warning of his approach, his stalking, his nearness, only headache.
Flies buzzed on wounds; sun glared from a hard blue sky. Kerian again looked around her at her warriors. She pointed to one, a lanky Kagonesti youth who wore the tattoos proudly on neck and shoulders. The boy was named Patch, for the streak of shining white in his dark hair. It had grown there on the dire night he learned the news that the Eagle Flight tribe had been slaughtered. He was one of the handful to survive that killing.
“Patch,” she said, “take Rale and go find and kill that Knight.”
His eyes lighted like green fire, and he leaped to do as she bid.
Kerian kicked the wagon; she kicked the dirt. Patch had a lot of hate to lose, and she wondered whether it was right to use that for her own weapon. She didn’t wonder long. Not all her weapons were as trusty as Patch, and she felt her anger rising hotter. Kerian glared around the clearing till she found her target sitting in the dust, bleeding.
“Rhyl, you’re a fool.”
The word rang again, louder, through the forest. On his knees binding the bleeding arm of a wounded companion, Jeratt looked up, then went back to his work.
Rhyl stumbled to his feet, still wiping blood from a seeping head wound, still stunned from a blow he hadn’t seen coming, the backstroke of the dead Knight’s sword, the blow struck a moment before an arrow took the human through the throat. Rhyl looked around at his friends, living and dead. Wobbly, he put a hand on the wagon to steady himself. The bounty of the wagon lay all over the ground, bales of tanned pelts that would have gone to Qualinost, into the shops of leathermen, there to become boots and jerkins and sheaths for swords. Tribute to the dragon.
“Who are you calling a fool?” Rhyl snarled, wiping blood from his face. “One Knight’s dead, and the other will be soon.”
Kerian grabbed a fistful of the elf’s shirt and jerked him closer until they were nearly nose to nose. “I told you we weren’t hitting anything on this road until the supply wagons came down.” She jerked her head at the little wagon. “That look to you like four wagons full of weapons, Rhyl?”
Rhyl spat in the dirt at her feet.
The others, wounded and hale, looked away, exhausted. Jeratt said nothing.
Kerian drew a purposeful breath. The wagon wheels creaked. In the sky the wind rose and sighed through the trees. Beside the broken wagon, the Knight groaned out the last of his blood. One of the wounded outlaws helped another to his feet. There would be ravens soon.
She said, “Getting hard for you, Rhyl, is it?”
He eyed her suspiciously.
“Hard not to just run down the hill and do a bit of thieving like in the good old days?”
He growled a yea or a nay or a leave-me-alone, and spat again.
The hand that had grabbed his shirt now moved to rest on his shoulder as though in friendly fashion.
“You agreed to be part of this, Rhyl. From the first night we talked about this, from the first moment you lifted a bow to kill a Knight, you agreed to take orders from me. You didn’t do that today. You broke out on your own, hit this little wagon too soon, and now there’s two of our comrades dead and if Patch doesn’t kill that Knight there’s going to be word in Qualinost about this. Maybe there will be anyway.”
Rhyl shrugged and twisted a lip to show he was not intimidated, but he backed a st
ep away when Kerian narrowed her eyes.
“Rhyl,” she said, her voice like winter’s ice. “I have to be able to count on you.”
He snorted. “All this for your king,” he said, sullenly. “We burn a few bridges, we plague a few Knights, we lurk around the taverns to pick up crumbs of news.”
Before Kerian could reply, Jeratt’s laughter rang harsh as a crow’s. “Not hardly, Rhyl. You have a fat little coffer hidden in the passage through the falls, all yours and shining with booty. Didn’t used to be more than a skinny crate with nothing but a few brass coins and mold growing in it.”
The first ravens sailed the sky, circling the clearing. Kerian gripped Rhyl’s shoulder and turned him round to see the wounded and the dead.
“Now I have to know-can I count on you?”
She glanced at Jeratt The half-elf shook his head.
Above, ravens shouted, the mass of them darkening the sky. Kerian looked up to see a half dozen of them peel away from the rest They sailed over the forest, westward above the Qualinost Road. A triumphant cry rang through the forest, high and eerie. The hair rose up on the back of Kerian’s arms. Patch had found his kill, and he would be lopping the head from the Knight’s neck even now, using the dead man’s sword to do that.
“Jeratt,” she said, not looking at Rhyl again. “Get things cleaned up here. Don’t make a big job of it Leave the Knight’s corpse, and drag the wagon into the forest Thagol’s going to hear about this, so he might as well see some of our handiwork. Just haul the worst of it off the road so farmers can get by.”
He cocked his head. “And you?”
“Well, I have to go talk to Bueren Rose, don’t I?” Her voice had the edge of a blade. “There’s word needs to be spread now.”
He said nothing, frustrated as she. Neither did he look at Rhyl as he bent to the work of clearing the road. He nodded, and she did, understanding between them.
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